A blend of Buffett's rich business and dark Labour days

"Overall, the lack of critical judgment is this book's great flaw," concluded Dan Roberts in the Sunday Telegraph, reviewing The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. "Alice Schroeder has got closer than anyone to explaining how Buffett rose to the top, but says little about why ... There is something both odd and heroic about this: placing Buffett somewhere between Forrest Gump and the selfless individualism of Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead. This is a man seemingly without ego, but who cuts through the world like a knife." "He steered well clear of the dotcom bubble and has been a longtime critic of the financial excesses that have led to today's troubles," noted Richard Lambert in the Financial Times. "The biography is right up to date - it covers the Bear Stearns collapse - and Buffett's thoughts about what is happening in the markets now are worth quoting ... 'The economy is definitely tanking. It's not my game, but if I had to bet one way or another - everyone else says a recession will be short and shallow, but I would say long and deep.' Coming from someone with his track record, this is not a comfortable thought."

"Where are the secrets, the white lies and as-yet-unreported nuances that shed light on what went on?" asked Jon Swaine in the Daily Telegraph, reviewing Tony's Ten Years: Memories of the Blair Administration. "Adam Boulton is married to Anji Hunter, one of Blair's closest confidantes ... he would have needed a reporter's ear of purest tin to have avoided some incendiary tales. If he didn't want to tell them, fine. But then why write a book?" "He is unforgivably generous to Peter Mandelson," said Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times. "Mandelson was certainly not, Boulton argues, dishonest or untrustworthy, simply on occasion too partisan in support of new Labour. Hmm. However, Boulton sticks the boot in good and proper to Alastair Campbell ... even tak[ing] away from Campbell his claim to have been one of the architects of New Labour, insisting that those in at the beginning were Mandelson, Blair adviser Roger Liddle and a certain Anji Hunter. I suppose we can forgive the writer for that most likeable of sins, uxoriousness, but it seems unnecessarily harsh on Campbell."

"As an inside account of the collective political nervous breakdown suffered by the Labour movement in the late 70s, these diaries have no equal," declared Iain Martin in the Daily Telegraph, reviewing Bernard Donoughue's Downing Street Diary: Volume Two - With James Callaghan in No 10. "It makes clear that, despite all the vicissitudes and Callaghan's doom-laden forecast that the pendulum had irrevocably swung, Labour could have survived," said Roy Hattersley in the Observer. "The cabinet was steady under fire. One of its strengths was its loyalty. Even in the darkest days, we never briefed against each other. A copy of Donoughue's fascinating book should be sent to every minister now in office." Alan Watkins in the Spectator observed that "Opinion polls put Labour ahead of the Conservatives, and Callaghan ahead of his party and of Margaret Thatcher. Certainly he made her sound shrill and look inadequate at Prime Minister's Questions ... The view of the political classes was that Mrs Thatcher, hard though she tried, was not quite up to it."